The Beat: A True Account of the Bondi Gay Murders

by I. J. Fenn

‘No.’

  ‘– gay meeting place?’

  ‘No. I never knew that.’ Emphatic.

  ‘Would you have been aware –’

  ‘In 1989? No. No. Never knew it was a gay park.’ Adamant, very certain.

  ‘Did the boys ever inform you that there were gay males in that park?’

  ‘No. Only, the only place that I knew where a gay was, were … the Wall – it was called the Wall – at Kings Cross. I didn’t think Bondi had gay parks. Sorry.’

  Yet others the police had interviewed, other gang members had said that everyone knew about the Marks Park beat. Could Kylie really not have known? She was heavily pregnant during the winter of ’89 so she might not have been as central to the gang as they’d thought, or as she’d thought. And if she’d been peripheral, given that she seemed … less bright than some of the others, she might not have realised. It seemed unlikely, but ….

  Did she ever witness any violent acts in Bondi, any bashings? Did she ever hear of any?

  There was plenty of violence, she said. Some of the boys used to beat up their girlfriends all the time, bash them.

  Any boys in particular? Any of them aggressive all the time?

  Cushman, she said, immediately. Yeah, Sean Cushman. And Darren, Glen, Daniel, Brendan, Robert Valecky. ‘They’re all violent,’ she said. They all beat up their girlfriends. But, no, she didn’t know of any other incidents at Bondi, nothing involving violence against anyone else. At Randwick, yeah, she’d seen some shit at Randwick where they’d been acting stupid, got thrown out of a cab and started a fight with someone in the street. Pretty vicious, too. But she couldn’t remember who it was, only that it was after a party at Shari’s house. Sorry.

  Unsurprisingly, the interview petered out in a series of negatives: no, she didn’t recognise Ross Warren or John Russell or David McMahon, no she didn’t know anything about their attacks, no she didn’t know about graffiti tags, no, no no…

  By 10.15am she was on her way home.

  • • •

  As Constables Pincham and Morieson discussed what they’d just heard they knew it wouldn’t be long before Kylie called one of her mates to go over her interview. They’d sealed the tapes, gone through the formalities, the adoption process in which Kylie had agreed she’d been treated correctly, and wondered what her spin on proceedings would be.

  vi

  ‘I don’t remember goin’ there, ever,’ the other Kylie said when they were talking about Marks Park. ‘Not that one. That’s too far away.’

  They’d discussed the interview in some detail, worried over the PTK, not knowing exactly who’d been in it. It was all too long ago, really, you couldn’t be expected to remember stuff from that long ago. Why did the cops need to speak to them? Why not the others, the boys?

  ‘They just need more evidence,’ Kylie said. ‘And they don’t have it … I’ve got a feeling it’s Robert Valecky … Just, that’s just my feeling.’

  The call ended soon after it started. Kylie seemed subdued when talking to the other Kylie, seemed reluctant to go into too much personal stuff, avoided specifics. Not so with Shari. When she’d finished talking to the other Kylie, she rang Shari and told her she’d just been interviewed. She’d recognised 32 in the photo book, she said. Thirty-two!

  ‘But I, I seriously think they’re chasin’ the wrong tree, mate.’

  ‘Oh, for fuckin’ sure, mate,’ Shari agreed. ‘None of those boys would’ve done that.’

  Of course they wouldn’t, they knew that, the cops knew it, too, didn’t they? ‘And they asked me, what did they, we all thought about gays when we were younger. I said, you’ve gotta be kidding me. I said, they were all 15-, 16-year-old boys rooting for the first time. Of course they didn’t like gay boys. Or gay men, I said. Well, you know, you had, you had the occasional poof and that. Oh, fags, nah, I said. But no, there was never any fights with poofs. We would’ve had fights with wogs.’

  Which was true, wasn’t it? Course it was. There was always fights with wogs. It was different now, though, she said. Her feelings towards gays now weren’t the same. ‘If they would’ve asked me, I would’ve said, well, Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. If my son comes home gay, I’ll disown him. Is that enough for ya? Fuckin’ oath, I would.’

  But behind it all, the same refrain: we didn’t do it, we wouldn’t do things like that. They might have been ‘naughty’, might have stolen, drank themselves silly, behaved like savages, but they never did anything ‘bad’.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Young and Dumb

  i

  With the phone taps and interviews of the Bondi Boys and their associates, the investigation was starting to come together, albeit without any concrete conclusions. A vivid picture had begun to emerge, a picture of wholesale gay hatred, possibly even grander in scale than that reported in the Sue Thompson reports, a picture of feral teens lawlessly running around Bondi and the Eastern Suburbs, causing trouble, behaving like tantrum-throwing infants. But far more seriously. Assaults, robberies, aggression of all kinds. But all of it so insignificant to the perpetrators that, 12 years on, they claimed they couldn’t remember it, really: that stuff had happened so frequently that they’d simply become inured to it all.

  And while the Bondi Boys were being spoken to by some of the Taradale officers, individuals from the Alexandria Eight were targeted by other officers on the team. On 10 January Adam French was interviewed by Detective Sergeant Page and Detective Sergeant Nuttall at Port Kembla Police Station. Steve Page led the interview.

  French, it was established, currently lived in Dapto with his girlfriend and their baby. He was working as a boatbuilder.

  At the top of the interview French was shown the photograph booklet and asked to identify anyone he recognised. He named them all one by one, stating how he knew them: school, the same area, football, the same area, neighbour, best friend, and so on. Okay, what about the area near Tamarama, south of Bondi, as depicted in this aerial photo? Are you familiar with it?

  ‘No. Not really much. Like, I always thought Marks Park was just that grass end up at the top of Bondi Beach, sort of the hilly area. I thought that was Marks Park. Is it?’

  Page produced a map. Could French just indicate on the map where he thought Marks Park was?

  He worked out where the Icebergs was, thought the park was somewhere near there.

  ‘Prior to 1990,’ Page asked, ‘had you been to Marks Park at Tamarama?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘With your training,’ Page said, meaning French’s football training with Souths, ‘Did they ever take you for runs around Marks Park?’

  ‘No, not around Bondi,’ French answered calmly. ‘It was too far away from Souths. No. But I have been, like, done a few runs around there. I used to be a lifeguard at Bronte Beach for a couple of years. So, I’ve, I’ve been around the, the track. I used to surf at Bondi so I used to … I know the track. Yeah.’

  ‘Have you been to Marks Park since 1990?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘During 1989 would you have been at Marks Park?’

  ‘No. No, not Marks Park. No. Not the one that you showed me.’

  Did the detective hear a hint of hesitation? Was there just a little too much denial to the simple question? He pressed on.

  ‘What we might do,’ he said. ‘Just so we know we’re talking about the same photograph, could I just get you to sign that page?’ He watched while French made a heavy job of his signature. Waited until he’d put it right. ‘Are you aware that Marks Park is a gay beat?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know what a gay beat is?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Page produced the photograph of Ross Warren, asked if French recognised him. He didn’t. Nor did he have any idea where he would have been at the time Warren disappeared. The newspapers didn’t help either because he was ‘too young for newspapers’ in 1989. The same answers came when John Russell’s photograph was placed before him.
If Russell had died at night, he said, he would have been at home. He lived with his grandmother, see, and he had to be home for dinner every night, was only rarely allowed out afterwards if he was playing basketball, that sort of thing. So, he couldn’t help in any way, really, didn’t know anything about Russell’s death. Or about David McMahon’s assault, had no idea where he was on 21 December 1989.

  ‘Did you frequent the Bondi area at night during 1989?’ Page asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You previously told me that you were living in Cope Street, Waterloo in 1989,’ Page continued. ‘Were you going to school that year?’

  French nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What school?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he replied. He thought for a moment. ‘It’d be the, it’s either JJ Cahill High School at Mascot or Cleveland Street High School in Alexandria.’

  And because he was still at school he didn’t have a job of any kind. And didn’t ‘do’ graffiti – never had.

  ‘What were your feelings towards gay males in 1989?’ Page asked, his questions flowing without emphasis or particular stress: each question was as important as the next, there was no indication that any particular answer would be seen as being more significant than any other.

  What did he think of gays? ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I just, I, just so long as they kept to themselves and, you know, out of the public eye and they done their own thing, that was fine. I obviously got into a bit of trouble for bashing one so, you know, if it was in public and I’d seen it … I think once I gave a guy a bit of a hiding and as a result I ended up in a lot of trouble. But at the moment I don’t, you know, I don’t care what they do basically.’

  It amazed Page how these people saw their actions – the brutal murder of an innocent man – as ‘a bit of trouble’, how they saw themselves as the guardians of public morality, policing the public domain and meting out the most draconian punishment for acts perceived by them as moral crimes. Did they – did French really believe what he was saying or was it just the rehearsed response of jail-hardened animals, the institutionalised inversion of perception: the murderers became the victims as soon as they were forced to act against these perverts who threatened society’s structure?

  The ‘bit of trouble’ French referred to was the murder of Richard Johnson (who was of such insignificance that he actually got Johnson’s Christian name wrong), implying that, apart from that, he’d never been in trouble before.

  ‘Do you recall,’ Page asked, to refresh his memory, ‘also being involved in an incident in July 1988 against another man by the name of Stephen Giles?’[1]

  Yeah, French recalled that. It just sort of happened, he said. He didn’t know Giles was gay. They’d been playing basketball, came out and saw this guy and … These things happen.

  Did these things that happen, Page wondered, happen to Ross Warren, too? Did they happen to John Russell and David McMahon and were they connected to the gangs who tagged themselves PTK or PSK? No, French knew nothing about any of that, knew nothing about who might have killed these people, had never heard of the tags. He wasn’t involved in any of it, he said.

  Page made no comment. He explained he was going to play a tape of a conversation recorded in July 1991. French could follow it on a transcript. It was a conversation between him and Dean Howard.

  French listened as the words seeped into the interview room, filling up the space between himself and the two detectives.

  ‘What can you tell me about that recording?’ Page asked at the end of the track.

  ‘Not much at the moment,’ French said, apparently a little discomforted. ‘I’m not real happy about the way the recording was taken. I was locked up at the time. That was taken without my knowledge or consent and, yeah, I’m not real happy about it. And I’ve spoke to solicitors and lawyers. There’s not much I can do to get it stricken or removed or whatever. But, yeah, a lot of it I was, I’d say I was skylarkin’. Boastin’ and things like that. Over-exaggerating. But I’d say some of it happened, yeah.’

  Whether or not he was happy with the way in which the recording was captured was irrelevant: a Supreme Court Judge had signed the warrant to allow it and that made it completely legal. Steve Page explained this to French before moving on. ‘Do you agree that earlier in this interview that you told me that prior to 1990 you weren’t aware that Bondi was a gay beat? Are you able to comment on that statement as a result of listening to the tape?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I knew about it. I didn’t know, I can’t remember how I found out and, yeah, I went out there a couple of times.’

  ‘And when you say, you previously told me that you weren’t involved in any other offences of violence against members of the gay community other than Giles and Johnson that we’ve spoken of. When you say that you’ve been out there a couple of times, and the product that’s on this tape, what can you now tell me about offences at Marks Park?’

  Smashed a guy, mate. There was me, Woolem, Sharkhead, someone. Police have brought someone in with his skateboard … tossed him off a cliff … only small, about five, five or six foot … tossed him off. Oh, mate. Took his car keys, tossed right out on the point, tossed his keys.

  What could he say? ‘Nothing.’

  ‘When you say you went out there a couple of times,’ relentless, Page kept the questions coming in a steady flow, ‘what do you mean by that?’

  ‘To do, well, I went out there, used to go to Bondi a fair bit and a couple of times on the way home from Bondi we stopped at the toilets at the top of Bondi there, South Bondi, and, yeah, had a run-in.’

  A run-in? An assault on somebody. But he couldn’t remember details, couldn’t say who was there or who the victim was or how the assault happened or if a skateboard was involved. But he was sure it wasn’t Ross Warren or John Russell.

  ‘There’s talk of, on the tape, of the man being pushed off a small cliff,’ Page went on. ‘What can you tell me about that?’

  ‘Not a great deal,’ French answered. ‘From memory I can’t tell you anything. Just what was in here –’ tapping the transcript. ‘Like I said before, I tried to blank pretty much of the last 14 years of my life out, so it’s pretty vague.’

  And what about the incident with the cigarette, Page asked? What about the time when a cigarette was put out on a man’s penis? Was that a true incident?

  ‘I don’t know to tell you the truth,’ French said. ‘Like, when I was put in with Dean Howard, I’d just given evidence against him, okay? And he’s a lot bigger than I am, a lot older than I am. I was scared. I thought I was gonna have the shit beat out of me so a lot of the things I said was, like I said, boasting. Over-exaggeration, stuff like that. Just to, well, basically to get back on the good side so I wouldn’t cop a hidin’. So, like I say, some of the things on there are true, some things aren’t. I can’t really remember.’

  So, which ones are true?

  ‘I assaulted a few guys out there, that’s true. But as for the particulars and what happened and that, I can’t give details to which was what, or what happened to, or things like that.’

  Sergeant Page waited for a while, taking his time over the next question, measuring his thoughts before turning them into words. ‘What concerns me,’ he said deliberately, ‘in relation to the product that’s been captured by this listening device, is that that offence that you’ve discussed at South Bondi with the male pushed off a small cliff, I believe that both Ross Warren and John Russell have met their deaths by being pushed off the cliffs at Tamarama as a result of gay-hate crime.’ He leaned forwards over the table, fixing his eyes on French’s face. ‘After having listened to this tape, are you in a position to reconsider your position?’

  French glanced around the room as though looking for a way out. ‘I’m sure we never pushed anyone off a cliff that didn’t get back up,’ he said. ‘That, that cliff there wasn’t high. Like I said, like it says, the guy’s got up screamin’. But, yeah, there was, no-one went off any high cliff or entered any
water, anything like that.’ No, definitely not. And he hadn’t heard of anyone – except what he heard ‘inside’ about the Rattanajurathaporn guys – pushing gay men off cliffs.

  Why did he target members of the gay community, Detective Sergeant Nuttall wondered? Why? Because he was young and dumb, French replied, young and dumb.

  ii

  Merlyn McGrath was interviewed again on 17 January at Nowra Police Station. Sergeant Page explained he was going to play her a lawfully captured telephone intercept product.

  ‘What’s the, what did you say, lawfully interrupted …?’ McGrath asked, not understanding.

  ‘Lawfully intercepted,’ Page repeated.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  After clarifying what he was about to do, Page played the tape and asked Merlyn who the voices were, asked if she could identify the two people speaking. Yeah, she could: it was her and her sister, she said.

  ‘Right,’ Page said. ‘Your sister inferred that there was a story that was running around about you getting stuck into Ross Warren?’

  ‘Yeah, and if the conversation hadn’t cut out, when she rang back she said that she wasn’t sure if I’d said it or me sister had said it. And when she rang our brother, Steven, to find out what Vicki had actually said, Vicki said, I remember nothing and best you all leave it that way.’ And then she got a phone call the same day, she said, and her sister told her the police had already spoken to Vicki. Steven told his sister to leave it where it was.

  Okay, Page said. But her sister did say there was a story…

  ‘No, she said there was a story that …’ Could he play the tape again, she couldn’t get it straight in her head.

  The recording was played a second time while McGrath listened to her own words, tinny sounding words that seemed to grate on the very air of the interview room. When the track ended, Page switched off the machine.

  ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘What can you tell me about that story?’

  ‘Nothing,’ McGrath said. ‘Like I said to me sister, you’ve probably got this taped on your thingo too, the only time I remember saying anything – and I can’t even be sure that I did say it – was, ’cause Vicki used to have a crush on him and, like, she wrote him bloody love letters and everything, and I remember I had a fight with her one day in Mum’s house and I pushed her up against the freezer and me sister said that I’d said something to her then, about her pretty boy, but I would’ve just been shit stirring her. Like I said to youse, I’ll take a lie detector test and everything. I know I’ve got nothing to do with this. So, yeah, that’s, that’s just, like I said to you, mate, when I, when we had the first interview, anyone would’ve said anything like that would’ve been Vicki because she was the one that had the crush on him.’